This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 10.0.5.

  Tor Browser 10.0.5 fixes the critical vulnerability discovered last week in the JavaScript engine.

• Update Thunderbird from 68.12 to 78.4.2.

  Thunderbird 78 replaces the Enigmail extension with built-in support for OpenPGP encryption.

  If you used Enigmail before Tails 4.13, follow our instructions to migrate from Enigmail to Thunderbird 78.

• Add a button to restart Tails at the end of creating the Persistent Storage. (#16384)

• Only include translations for languages that are available in the Welcome Screen. This reduces the size of the download by 5%. (#17139)

• Make the root directory of the Persistent Storage only readable by the root user. (#7465)

  Users of the Dotfiles feature of the Persistent Storage can choose Places ▸ Dotfiles to open the /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles folder in the Files browser.

• Enable TCP timestamps. This might increase stability on slower Internet connections. (#17491)

Fixed problems

• Fix the Upgrade button of Tails Installer when running Croatian, Danish, French, Hebrew, Macedonian, Simplified Chinese, and Turkish. (#17982)

• Allow raising the sound volume above 100%. (#17322)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.13

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

• Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.2 or later to 4.13.

• If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

• Install from Windows
• Install from macOS
• Install from Linux

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.13 directly:

• For USB sticks (USB image)
• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image)

What's coming up?

Tails 4.14 is scheduled for December 15.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Releases

• Tails 4.12 was released on October 20.

• Tails 4.13 is scheduled for November 17.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.12:

• Add a button to cancel an automated upgrade while downloading. (#17310)

• Fix several internationalization issues in Electrum, Tails Installer, and Tails Upgrader. (#17958, #17758, and #17961)

• Anonymize URLs in the technical details provided by WhisperBack. (#17147)

Code

• Good progress on the upgrade to Thunderbird 78 (#17148, #17147)

• Worked together with our Help Desk to improve our collaboration and focus on issues that will make a difference for many Tails users.

• Resumed work on automating our manual release quality assurance.

• Re-enabled TCP timestamps (#17491)

• Added buttons to restart Tails at the end of creating the Persistent Storage (#16384)

• Dropped obsolete code for read-only persistence (#17972)

• Fixed tails-installer failing to operate in Turkish (#17576)

• Anti-Test for ICMP dropping on tor_enforcement fails (#17848)

• Document --keep-snapshots in our test doc (#17802)

• Avoid mirrors and rsync.lizard running out of disk space during the release process when upgrades to a beta/RC are present (#17944)

• Migrate deb.tails.boum.org APT source to v3 onion (#17937)

• Regression with Intel Corporation [8086:22b0] and [8086:22b1] GPU since 4.9 (#17953)

• Evaluate Debian packages maintenance setup (#17765)

• Tor Browser displays an "Update Failed" pop-up (#17159)

• All branches FTBFS since Thunderbird 78 reached the Buster security repo (#17962)

• Move custom software to our main Git repository (#7036)

• Move WhisperBack source to our main Git repository (#16936)

Hot topics on our help desk

• A lot of people reached the helpdesk at the start of the month worried about JavaScript not being disabled when Tor Browser is in safest mode: NoScript is doing that job now, as intended. (#17963)

• Keyboard and touchpad are not working anymore on some Acer and Asus laptops. (#17955)

• Tails cannot start with some new Intel cards. (#17953)

• Tails Installer does not allow upgrade in languages that have a translation for the 'Clone the current Tails' string. (#17982)

Infrastructure

• We started experimenting with GitLab CI (tails/sysadmin/-/issues/17740)

• We upgraded to Debian 10 ("Buster") the nodes that run automated tests on Tails images in our CI (tails/sysadmin/-/issues/17731)

Funding

Grants

• Our application to RIPE NCC on improving Tails for censorship circumvention was approved.

• Our applications to Prototype Fund in March and Code Lutins were rejected.

Donation process

• We analyzed the results of the A/B testing on the new display of "one- time" and "monthly".

  The new version leads to more donation attempts AND less cancellations in the attempt. The new version is live on the website for everybody now.

Donation campaign

• We launched the donation campaign!

• We started a database of problems reported by donors, as a way of gathering data whenever we will want to improve on the most pressing issues.

• The only metrics that we can gather right now is donations in cryptocurrencies.

  So far we've had +62% donations in Bitcoin (266, 6.9k€) and +205% donations in Monero (156, 2.2k€).

Translations

• We improved the staging website build process.

• We changed the maintainers email contact from tails-translations@boum.org to tails-weblate@boum.org, to prevent confusion on matters related to translations. (#17734

All the website

• fr: 78% (5159) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy
• es: 49% (3300) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• de: 28% (1899) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• it: 28% (1863) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• fa: 21% (1396) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• pt: 19% (1299) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• es: 83% (1791) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• fr: 75% (1603) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• it: 49% (1059) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
• de: 45% (972) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
• pt: 38% (821) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
• fa: 19% (425) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

• zh_TW: 21% (461) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• zh: 10% (222) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• ru: 8% (181) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• ca: 8% (174) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• tr: 7% (171) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• ar: 7% (164) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• pl: 7% (165) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• id: 6% (139) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• sr_Latn: 5% (114) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 947 750 times this month. This makes 30 572 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 10.0.2.

• Update tor to 0.4.4.5.

• Update Linux to 5.8 and most firmware packages. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

• Add a button to cancel an automated upgrade while downloading. (#17310)

Fixed problems

• Fix several internationalization issues in Electrum, Tails Installer, and Tails Upgrader. (#17958, #17758, and #17961)

• Anonymize URLs in the technical details provided by WhisperBack. (#10695)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.12

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

• Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.2 or later to 4.12.

• If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

• Install from Windows
• Install from macOS
• Install from Linux

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.12 directly:

• Для USB-носителей (USB образ)
• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image)

What's coming up?

Tails 4.13 is scheduled for November 17.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Releases

• Tails 4.11 was released on September 22.

• Tails 4.12 is scheduled for October 20.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.11:

• We added a new feature of the Persistent Storage to save the settings from the Welcome Screen: language, keyboard, and additional settings.

• Configure KeePassXC to use the new default location Passwords.kdbx. (#17286)

• Update python3-trezor to 0.12.2 to add compatibility with the new Trezor Model T.

• Disable the feature to Turn on Wi-Fi Hotspot in the Wi-Fi settings because it doesn't work in Tails. (#17887)

Code

• Completed the last steps of an effort started 14 months ago to import our custom software into our main Git repository (#7036), in order to streamline Tails development work:

  • Tails Installer (#17917)
  • WhisperBack (#16936)

• Ported all our Perl code to a translatable strings format supported by GNU gettext (#17928), which will then allow us to benefit from brand new i18nspector checks, avoiding some classes of Tails bugs caused by buggy translations

• Upgraded to tor 0.4.4 (#17932)

• Settled on a new policy for kernel updates, that balances rapid hardware enablement with lower risk of regressions (#17911)

Hot topics on our help desk

1. A lot of people reached the helpdesk complaining about JavaScript not being disabled by Tor Browser's safest mode anymore (NoScript is doing that job now as it should; to be documented in #17963).

2. People are still affected (and will be until the Linux kernel is upgraded to 5.8) by a regression with some Intel GPU.

3. Another regression affecting some Acer and Asus laptops was reported since the release of Tails 4.11.

4. People are still regularly complaining about Seahorse failing to import public keys.

Also, it seemed important to the Help Desk team to remind Tails users that we are not responsible for the cosmetic changes made upstream (e.g. the handling of JavaScript in Tor Browser, or the new Firefox URL bar that received a lot of comments from users on our helpdesk as well as Tor project's). Any thoughts on those changes should be done directly to the people working on them.

Outreach

• Roma hackmeeting: see the report

On-going discussions

• Merge tails-dev, tails-ux, and tails-project mailing lists

Translations

All programs

• ar: 22 translated messages, 316 untranslated messages.
• ca: 48 translated messages, 290 untranslated messages.
• cs: 112 translated messages, 226 untranslated messages.
• da: 338 translated messages.
• de: 55 translated messages, 283 untranslated messages.
• el: 58 translated messages, 280 untranslated messages.
• es: 335 translated messages, 3 untranslated messages.
• es_AR: 336 translated messages, 2 untranslated messages.
• fi: 45 translated messages, 293 untranslated messages.
• fr: 338 translated messages.
• ga: 335 translated messages, 3 untranslated messages.
• he: 65 translated messages, 273 untranslated messages.
• hr: 338 translated messages.
• hu: 338 translated messages.
• id: 6 translated messages, 332 untranslated messages.
• it: 162 translated messages, 176 untranslated messages.
• km: 38 translated messages, 300 untranslated messages.
• ko: 1 translated message, 337 untranslated messages.
• lt: 87 translated messages, 251 untranslated messages.
• mk: 335 translated messages, 3 untranslated messages.
• nl: 17 translated messages, 321 untranslated messages.
• pl: 2 translated messages, 336 untranslated messages.
• pt_BR: 94 translated messages, 244 untranslated messages.
• pt_PT: 44 translated messages, 294 untranslated messages.
• ro: 135 translated messages, 203 untranslated messages.
• sv: 134 translated messages, 204 untranslated messages.
• tr: 337 translated messages, 1 untranslated message.
• zh_CN: 337 translated messages, 1 untranslated message.

All the website

• de: 28% (1899) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• es: 49% (3300) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• fa: 21% (1396) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• fr: 78% (5159) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy
• it: 28% (1863) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• pt: 19% (1299) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• de: 45% (972) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
• es: 83% (1791) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• fa: 19% (425) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
• fr: 75% (1603) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• it: 49% (1059) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
• pt: 38% (821) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

• ar: 7% (164) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• ca: 8% (174) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• id: 6% (139) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• pl: 7% (165) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• ru: 8% (181) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• sr_Latn: 5% (114) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• tr: 7% (171) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• zh: 10% (222) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• zh_TW: 21% (461) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 906 004 times this month. This makes 30 200 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

New features

• We added a new feature of the Persistent Storage to save the settings from the Welcome Screen: language, keyboard, and additional settings.

  To restore your settings when starting Tails, unlock your Persistent Storage in the Welcome Screen.

  

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 10.0.

• Update Thunderbird to 68.12.

• Update Linux to 5.7.17. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

• Configure KeePassXC to use the new default location Passwords.kdbx. (#17286)

• Update python3-trezor to 0.12.2 to add compatibility with the new Trezor Model T.

Fixed problems

• Disable the feature to Turn on Wi-Fi Hotspot in the Wi-Fi settings because it doesn't work in Tails. (#17887)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.11

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

• Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.2 or later to 4.11.

• If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

• Install from Windows
• Install from macOS
• Install from Linux

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.11 directly:

• For USB sticks (USB image)
• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image)

What's coming up?

Tails 4.12 is scheduled for October 20.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Releases

• Tails 4.10 was released on August 25.

• Tails 4.11 is scheduled for September 22.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.10:

• Update Linux to 5.7.10. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

• Hide the welcome message when starting Thunderbird.

• Fix support for USB Wi-Fi adapters with Atheros AR9271 hardware. (#17834)

• Fix USB tethering from iPhone. (#17820)

Code

• Added support for older TREZOR firmware (!142).

• Started working on the upgrade to Thunderbird 78 ESR, and in particular its new OpenPGP support (#17148).

• Automated generation of our Changelog (#17886).

• Automated generation of the security advisory boilerplate from a template that technical writers can improve (!128).

• Hidden broken "Turn on Wi-Fi Hotspot" feature in GNOME Wi-Fi settings (#17887).

• Fixed sorting Intel GPUs last in the "Error starting GDM" message (#17903).

• Upgraded Linux to 5.7.17-1 (#17895).

Documentation and website

• Changed massively our instructions on how to start Tails:

  1. Documented Shift + Restart on Windows. (#16456)

     We're not telling Windows users to use the Boot Menu key anymore.

     It's still the default for Linux.

  2. Wrote dedicated pages for starting Tails on PC and Mac.

  3. Simplified troubleshooting sections.

     We simplified and made consistent the troubleshooting instructions in all installation scenarios.

  4. Removed instructions to report to Help Desk from the installation scenarios but kept them on doc/first steps/start.

  We believe that all these changes will lower your workload and make more people start Tails at the same time.

• Rephrased our FAQ about VPN. (#15783)

• Wrote an FAQ about 32-bit computers. (#17866)

• Fixed all outdated links to torproject.org. (#17717)

• Used ikiwiki's automatic referencing of HTML ids in table of content on the pages that have the longest tables of content. (#17844)

  Now you can copy links directly from the table of content to point to:

  https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#javascript

User experience

• Analyzed the responses of the OpenPGP and Pidgin survey. (#17821)

  It's pretty exciting because we barely have quantitative data about our user base at large.

  Highlights:

  • Our users find Tails relatively easy to use compared to an industry average.

  • Linux users are still the biggest share of the respondents and this hasn't changed much since 2017.

  • The top 5 wishes of our users are, in rough order:

    1. Do nothing because Tails is great already :)

    2. More persistent settings: security level in Tor Browser, background, keyboard, and language

    3. Messaging applications and voice calls

    4. Make Tor less painful for web browsing

    5. Better upgrades

  • OpenPGP is much more popular outside Thunderbird: 49% vs. 16%.

  • Enigmail users are more technical than OpenPGP users overall.

  • Electrum (28%) is more used than Thunderbird (27%), which is more used than XMPP (17%).

  • IRC is used by a non-negligible 8% of respondents.

Hot topics on our help desk

This last month we felt that the social crisis created by covid is starting to take a toll on our users mental state, and we received more derailed emails than usual. Hopefully there are local resources you can count on for this difficult times. Take care!

1. Many users wrote to us with problems related to MacbookPros from 2020.

   Apple in general does not prioritize collaborating with Free Software projects, and their newest hardware is usually very hard for Free Software developers to get working with Linux, and thus Tails. In comparison, hardware for PC tends to be more open and get support for Linux faster. Please take that into consideration if you are buying hardware to run Tails.

2. The last release also saw some users with graphics cards issues. Please read the page shown on the error message before mailing us, because there might be a solution for your graphics card.

3. Some users had problems to do automatic upgrades to Tails 4.10. Update: this was fixed.

Infrastructure

• Set up infrastructure that will allow Release Managers to upload to git-annex faster (tails/sysadmin/-/issues/17687).

• Started coordination for requiring Buster or newer for running our test suite (#17842).

• Started upgrading our Jenkins "isotester" workers to Buster.

• Summed up the findings from "Gather usability data about our current CI" (#16959).

Funding

Grants

• Our grant to Reset from May 1 was rejected.

• We applied to RIPE NCC to work on usability improvements for censorship circumvention.

Donations

• We ?surveyed "lapsed donors" who haven't donated since 2019 and analyzed 121 responses. Conclusions:

  • We're doing good! Negative comments were few exceptions in a mass of love: the work that we do is very important and we do it well.

  • We should communicate a bit more and better with past donors:

    • The main reason for lapsed donors not to renew their donation is lack of awareness.
    • We should write a newsletter to donors half-way through the year or when we have major improvements.
    • Adding an opt-in mechanism for our newsletter would allow us to be less shy to write them.
    • LimeSurvey is more convenient to send mass emails to donors.
    • We should communicate more about the impact of donations and how we spend the money.

  • About our donors and their interests:

    • Donors are mostly users (74%) but they are really into helping others (70%).

    • Donors mostly talk about:

      • Privacy (24)
      • Protection from oppressive governments and persecution (18)
      • Liberty and freedom of speech (16)

• We merged a first batch of improvements to our Donate page:

  • To better explain our mission:

    • We wrote new slogans.
    • We improved the text on the left.

  • To better explain how we spend our money:

    • We simplified the chart and added short text to explain each of maintenance, improvements, user experience, and administration.
    • We added a section about our impact with numbers of daily users.

  • To increase trust:

    • We duplicated the recommendations from the Home page.
    • We improved the color scheme of the charts.

Partners

• We added Freiheitsfoo as partner.

On-going discussions

• Exporting secret PGP key in SeaHorse: Link to the thread.
• GitLab MR terminology update: WIP→ Draft : Link to the thread.
• Reviewers: Link to the thread.

Translations

All the website

• de: 29% (1921) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• es: 49% (3241) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• fa: 21% (1401) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• fr: 80% (5231) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• it: 27% (1805) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• pt: 19% (1289) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• de: 47% (992) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
• es: 83% (1744) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• fa: 20% (422) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
• fr: 79% (1651) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
• it: 48% (1010) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
• pt: 38% (803) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

• ar: 8% (172) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• ca: 8% (185) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• id: 8% (189) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• pl: 9% (214) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• ru: 10% (230) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• sr_Latn: 7% (164) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy
• tr: 9% (216) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• zh: 12% (272) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• zh_TW: 23% (505) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 939 540 times this month. This makes 30 308 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Tails 4.11, scheduled for September 22, will be the first version of Tails to include Tor Browser 10.0 and to support persistent settings on the Welcome Screen!

You can help Tails by testing the release candidate for Tails 4.11 now.

Persistent settings on the Welcome Screen

If you enable this persistence feature your Welcome Screen settings, like language selection and any administration password, will be automatically saved between sessions. While at the Welcome Screen the settings are restored as soon as you unlock your persistent encrypted volume. Please let us know if there are any problems!

Tor Browser 10.0 (alpha 6)

This new major release of Tor Browser is based on a brand new Firefox ESR series, version 78, which contains tons of changes, most under the hood. There's a risk that some of these changes break some expected feature in Tails, so please pay close attention and report any such issues to us!

Changelog

For more details about what has changed in Tails 4.11~rc1, read our changelog.

Known issues

• In Tor Browser, opening file:// URLs has a problem: opening any such local file will result in an infinite refresh loop like if you kept the F5 key pressed, so it will likely not display anything. At the moment this makes it impossible to read the offline documentation inside Tails, for instance. This will be fixed in Tails 4.11.

See the list of long-standing issues.

How to test Tails 4.11~rc1?

Keep in mind that this is a test image. We tested that it is not broken in obvious ways, but it might still contain undiscovered issues.

Please, report any new problem to tails-testers@boum.org (public mailing list).

Get Tails 4.11~rc1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

• Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2 or later to 4.11~rc1.

  To do an automatic upgrade to Tails 4.11~rc1:

  1. Start Tails 4.2 or later and set an administration password.

  2. Run this command in a Terminal:

     echo TAILS_CHANNEL=\"alpha\" | sudo tee -a /etc/os-release && \
          tails-upgrade-frontend-wrapper
     

     Enter the administration password when asked for the "password for amnesia".

  3. After the upgrade is applied, restart Tails and choose Applications ▸ Tails ▸ About Tails to verify that you are running Tails 4.11~rc1.

• If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To download 4.11~rc1

Direct download

• For USB sticks (USB image) (?OpenPGP signature)

• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image) (?OpenPGP signature)

BitTorrent download

• For USB sticks (USB image)

• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image)

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

• Install from Windows
• Install from macOS
• Install from Linux

What's coming up?

Tails 4.11 is scheduled for September 22.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 9.5.4.

• Update Tor to 0.4.3.6.

• Update Electrum from 3.3.8 to 4.0.2.

• Update Linux to 5.7.10. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

• Hide the welcome message when starting Thunderbird.

Fixed problems

• Fix support for USB Wi-Fi adapters with Atheros AR9271 hardware. (#17834)

• Fix USB tethering from iPhone. (#17820)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.10

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

• Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.2 or later to 4.10.

• If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

• Install from Windows
• Install from macOS
• Install from Linux

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.10 directly:

• Для USB-носителей (USB образ)
• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image)

What's coming up?

Tails 4.11 is scheduled for September 22.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Releases

• Tails 4.9 was released on June 28.

• Tails 4.10 is scheduled for August 25.

Code

• Prepared upgrade to tor 0.4.3.6 (#17835)
• Researched how to cope with the fact Electrum is not installable on Buster anymore (#17828)
• Improved robustness of our automated test suite
• Documented some internal processes (#17571, #17772)

Documentation and website

• We documented how to use USB tethering when Wi-Fi doesn't work in Tails. (#16987)

• We improved our FAQ on VPN. (#9145)

User experience

• Launched a user survey about ease of use, online privacy tools, OpenPGP, and Pidgin. (#17821)

  We got more than 600 responses so far. Thanks a lot to everybody who participated!

Hot topics on our help desk

We started the month with Tails 4.8 and many users wrote to us because of problems with the Tails Welcome Screen:

1. They had issues with administration passwords that had special characters.

2. They could not access their persistent storage because changing the language on the Welcome Screen didn't change the keyboard layout as usual, although it claimed to do it.

These two issues were very upsetting for the users, although had easy workarounds. They are fixed in Tails 4.9 (Apologies!), but in the same time the kernel upgrade brought new issues (Re: Apologies!):

1. A lot of people reported the starting Tails was impossible since the upgrade to Tails 4.9 with their Intel Corporation [8086:22b0] GPU.

2. Some people reported that their Wi-Fi adapter was not working anymore.

Infrastructure

• Put our translation platform. back in sync' with Git
• Updated our Jenkins and its plugins (tails/sysadmin/-/issues/16955)
• Improved our monitoring of download mirrors
• Ported detection of stalled issues/MRs to GitLab (!110)

Funding

• Our proposal to OTF on anti-censorship was paused due to their budget problems.

• Our joint proposal with Tor to DRL was declined but invited to submit again next year.

• We applied to the Mecenat Code Lutins to work on usability improvements.

• We added Wordable and Exam Success as partners.

• We coded some A/B testing to measure the impact of a design change on our one-time and monthly donations buttons. (52a2d90a42)

• We made plans to ?improve our donation process.

• We published our income statement for 2019.

Outreach

Past events

• Mexico City hackerspace Rancho Electrónico did a series of three virtual Tails workshops on July 14 - 21 and August 4 as part of their AutoDefensa Digital sessions.

Translations

All the website

• fr: 82% (5350) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• es: 46% (3030) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• de: 30% (1966) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• it: 27% (1795) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• fa: 22% (1468) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• pt: 21% (1401) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• fr: 80% (1678) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
• es: 75% (1565) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
• it: 49% (1031) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
• de: 49% (1025) strings translated, 22% strings fuzzy
• pt: 39% (812) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• fa: 19% (414) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

• zh_TW: 25% (447) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
• zh: 12% (224) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• ru: 8% (160) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• pl: 8% (149) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• tr: 8% (148) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• ar: 7% (132) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• ca: 7% (131) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• id: 5% (99) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy
• sr_Latn: 4% (80) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 951 736 times this month. This makes 30 701 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 9.5.3.

• Update Thunderbird to 68.10.0.

• Update Linux to 5.7.6. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

Fixed problems

• Allow characters others than A–Z, a–z, 1–9, and _@%+=:,./- in the administration password. (#17792)

• Apply the keyboard layout that is automatically selected when you change the language in the Welcome Screen. (#17794)

• Fix starting Tails with the toram boot option. (#17800)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

• USB Wi-Fi adapters with Atheros AR9271 hardware do not work with Linux 5.7.6. (#17834)

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.9

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

• Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.2 or later to 4.9.

• If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

• Install from Windows
• Install from macOS
• Install from Linux

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.9 directly:

• Для USB-носителей (USB образ)
• For DVDs and virtual machines (ISO image)

What's coming up?

Tails 4.10 is scheduled for August 25.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!